NITI Aayog
NITI Aayog & World Intellectual Property Organization Hold Workshop on Improving India’s Rank in Global Innovation Index
NITI Aayog and the World Intellectual Property Organization  conducted a workshop virtually on improving India’s ranking in the Global Innovation Index  on 17 January 2021 with stakeholder ministries and departments.
NITI Aayog is the nodal department of GoI for improving India’s performance in the GII. It has been taking several steps in this regard, from the constitution of an inter-ministerial committee to regularly interacting with top-ranking countries in the index to understand and adopt their best practices.
While delivering the opening remarks in the inaugural session of the workshop, NITI Aayog Vice Chairman Dr Rajiv Kumar said, ‘The nations of the world that seek to become a hotbed of innovation, like India, find the Global Innovation Index an indispensable tool to guide the formulation, implementation and monitoring of policies. In particular, innovation is the key for growth and development in emerging economies.’
NITI Aayog Member  Dr VK Saraswat spoke on the significance of emerging technologies in the growth of innovation. He said, ‘Innovation has been acquiring a significant dimension of creating real value across various sectors, with emerging technologies such as cloud computing, Internet of Things, energy storage, robotics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, etc. These technologies have led to the rise of an innovation economy.’
The interactive session of the workshop began with a presentation by Dr Sacha Wunsch-Vincent, Co-Editor of GII, on the conceptual framework of the index and its ranking mechanism. ‘A core benefit of the GII is that it positions data-based evidence and metrics at the core of evaluating, crafting, and deploying innovation policies. It brings together stakeholders to understand innovation performance and enables leveraging domestic innovation opportunities,’ Dr Wunsch-Vincent said.
The session was then opened up to the participating stakeholder Ministries and Departments for interaction with the GII team from the WIPO. The subsequent discussion was focused on the sourcing and reporting of data for the indicators and the relevance and construction of the indicators in the GII. Several queries were addressed and a channel of communication between the stakeholder Ministries/Departments and the WIPO was established.
India in Global Innovation Index 2021
India has been an ‘Innovation Achiever’ for 11 years in a row and it produces more innovation outputs relative to its level of innovation investments. During the workshop, NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant stressed that ‘our policies aim to transform India into a vibrant ecosystem for innovators by encouraging new businesses, attracting global talent and investments and undertaking socially conscious cutting-edge research’. WIPO Assistant Director-General Dr Marco M. Aleman agreed and congratulated India on consistently improving its performance. He said this showed that the country’s policies were indeed proving to be productive in improving innovation.
In the 2021 edition, while India bagged the 46th position overall—two spots higher than 2020—it ranked first among ten economies of Central and Southern Asia and second among 34 lower-middle-income-group economies.
Another important highlight of the index report was that relative to its Gross Domestic Product , India’s performance is above expectation for its level of development.
Inter-Ministerial Committee to Boost India’s Performance in GII
To improve India’s ranking in the Global Innovation Index, NITI Aayog has constituted an inter-ministerial coordination committee, chaired by its CEO Amitabh Kant. The committee monitors the progress of updation of data for the indicators of the index. The workshop is an outcome of a decision taken during one of the committee meetings.
Chaired by Dr Rajiv Kumar and Dr Marco M. Aleman, the workshop was attended by key dignitaries from NITI Aayog, WIPO, and all the stakeholder ministries and departments.
The closing remarks were made by NITI Aayog Senior Adviser Neeraj Sinha, who emphasized the importance of the availability of updated data at the point of collection by the WIPO.  He also exhorted the ministries and departments to highlight to the WIPO those indicators that were not relevant to India and could be considered for modification.